I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.

If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota.

People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, ....

A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.

South Dakota (and other such places) have most of those things up to reasonable standards, except perhaps the (well-connected) telecoms and airports in some cases. All of those things can come together as the population scales up and demands them.

I agree that gathering people into larger population centers is way more efficient for us and the planet, but I don't think anyone's arguing for us all to spread out on 10 acre farmsteads.

The middle ground is just to build more decently-sized cities in all of the vast available land. Why fight for overpriced artificially scarce land in San Francisco when there are 20 other SF-equivalent cities a state or two away (existing ones, or ones that could be hypothetically built). "Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.

As a side bonus: by moving a bunch of coastal persons back into the flyover country, you're re-exporting newer cultural norms into those backwaters, perhaps enough to cause meaningful cultural and political reform in places that sorely need it!

>"Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.

Why? I want to live where I get to do the things I enjoy. I would say most people I know prefer temperate, low humidity weather, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, beaches, mountains, lakes, good water quality and security, etc. The places that have these features will cost the most, since more people will be bidding up the price.

Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities.

I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.

You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing.

Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).

There are 57.5 million square miles of land on Earth, including mountains, deserts, rainforests, national parks, tundra, and Antarctica. There are currently 7.4 billion people. This works out to ~4.9 acres per person of land of any type.

World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.

I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.

> encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres

There will soon be 11 billion people in the world.

This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.

Strong Towns notes that the real cost of spreading out is all the infrastructure you need to maintain.

Running water? Gotta run the pipes further. Road access? Gotta pave (and maintain) more road Power? Same thing

Plus having decent response times for emergency services, quick commute to things like groceries as you mentioned.

Not to mention having critical mass for a commercial district with any sort of variety within reasonable distances of each other to compete and cross-pollinate.

But they ignore the risks of infill where infrastructure approaches capacity. And much of the infrastructure dates back a century or more. As you infill, demand for water/sewer/gas/electricity increases.

Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!

Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.

I grew up out there. Lots of those 100k+ jobs are oil jobs. It's hard work, even if you aren't working directly on the drilling rigs.

It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.

> LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living).

They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere.

Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.

I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.

Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.

I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges.

We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder.

I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...

I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)

I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs.

Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution.

And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.

I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face.

Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".

This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.

> For humanity to continue growing as a species

I'm pretty young.

Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius.

The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it.

We can't go on like this.

"We can't go on like this."

There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.

Mmm. I live in the UK.

London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really.

Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance.

We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.

> We can't go on like this.

What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point?

> The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces

I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something.

Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.

> maybe involving terraforming other planets

This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here.

Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead?

I mean, seriously.

No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future.

The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.

Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans.

That's my main point, not what the solution looks like.

Tall buildings are inherently communal.

Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader.

We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that.

My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.

> Tall buildings are inherently communal.

Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.

> Tall buildings are inherently communal.

Cool so stop building them.

You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK.

For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.

You're not solving the problem. There is no shortage of space for the future 11 billion humans. The big problem is the centralization of companies within few top tier cities without a corresponding increase in housing for the (locally) growing population.

I agree.

It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities.

That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others.

If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.

Network effects are real. You can't wish them out of existence; it simply doesn't work that way. Inevitably some cities will be better at some things than other cities, and that advantage snowballs.

It's easier to colonize Mars. No planning board.

Look at this map of total fertility :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...

If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement.

There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates.

Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers.

There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

Don't worry, we're not. Human population growth is slowing down at a remarkable rate.

A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses.

Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

While simultaneously snidely implying that these unwashed peasants will never understand our progressive ways while forcing them to live in environments that needs fossil fuel fueled AC and heating instead of somewhere like the coast which needs neither.

I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example.

But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.

Not only that, the people who say that fail to realize that population control will simply replace a housing crisis with a demographic crisis. We're going to need a lot of people to care for the aging boomers as they enter their retirement years. The boomers don't realize that one of the groups most hurt by their policies will be themselves.

The population physically cannot grow limitlessly so there must be a point at which you level off.

If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.

Signs point to the 10 billionth (concurrently living) human being never being born, birth rates have begun to stabilize worldwide as more countries modernize. Remember, more educated populations with better health care reproduce less.

It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.

We're already over the carrying capacity if the world wants first world lifestyle.

Only if they want a first-world lifestyle, though.

Cut out meat, suburban lawns, and the cars that go with them, and the earth could support 10B people right now, at the living standards of a typical Millenial in a cosmopolitan metropolis.

Unfortunately, there's pretty good indications that most people on earth want those meats, suburban lawns, and cars, so I think it's more likely we'll get war instead. But it's totally doable, at a standard of living that people will grumble at but could abide.

Viable meat replacements are right around the corner. I don't think this is a blocker.

> meats, suburban lawns, and cars

Can I opt out of the coming war if I don't want these things?

If you can get enough of your like-minded friends to settle an area that doesn't have many of the desirable resources that'll be fought over (water, fertile land, nice climate) and doesn't have many people who do want those things, probably. Just be Switzerland.

Debatable, a large issue is land use and for all the land we have here in the US alone large swathes of it are used for single family homes promoting horrible density. We dump carbon into the air, have less arable land, and destroy more natural habitats than necessary because of poor planning and regulation.

There is more issues to be solved, yes - but reversing wasteful land use is a HUGE component of preserving our planet and quality of life.

If you think we can't sustain every couple/person on earth having a single family home then you're agreeing with my statement.

What is "first world lifestyle"?

The life style of a well-to-do member of America or Western Europe.

I think you'll find that not everyone wants this lifestyle, and trying to force everybody into it because you want it is a silly form of reductionism.

I don't think people fully understand just what failure of the social safety net actually means. Without population growth, Social Security and Medicare collapse. Even worse, government pensions in the United States are near insolvent already. A steep decline in population growth will bankrupt many states and municipalities.

Then they will inevitably collapse...

Why does humanity need to grow in population? That doesn't make sense and is an invalid assumption underlying what you're asking for here.

Because someone is going to have to care for an aging population. You can look at Japan for what happens when you have zero or negative population growth.

A giant ponzi scheme then? When it finally hits a brick wall, there are going to be that many more people on the earth to suffer the consequences. There has to be another way.

Exactly why student loan debts, insufficient housing, and the gig economy are larger problems than they appear at first glance.

Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate.

If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.

Again, why does it need to grow? There seem to be people in this thread expecting that unchecked human population growth is a sure sign of progress. It isn't. And our current population levels are also unsustainable.

Because otherwise the social safety net--Medicare and Social Security included--will collapse.

Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.

> For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.

This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.

The intuitions about Malthusian limits are basically correct within car culture. Further scalability is of course possible, but it requires lifestyle changes and a lot of expensive infrastructure building, sacrifices incumbents would rather not make.

Maybe the unrestrained growth is not a good idea.

Its true though. Yes we could turn the Bay Area and LA into something like Tokyo or NYC but its better the way it is, even if its unaffordable.

What about the way that it currently is makes it better? I've lived in the Bay area and visited NYC several times and would vastly prefer to live in a city designed like NYC but with a Bay area climate.

For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.

Personally, I'd rather live in NYC or Tokyo than the Bay, and indeed that is the choice I eventually made.